Startup Spotlight: Poppin Brings the Party to You
Meet Tejes Srivalsan, a third year student at UCLA and the founder of Poppin, the latest events platform on the rise. An entrepreneur and wildly creative individual, Srivalsan founded Poppin in high school to increase access to parties as a side quest to his studies. After launching his platform in the Bay Area, Poppin accumulated thousands of downloads in its first week going live. Seeing an opportunity for growth, Srivalsan then brought Poppin to UCLA — a decision which made his startup one of the most successful initiatives to come out of UCLA in the past five years.
Consistently drawn to the path less traveled, Srivalsan describes independence and initiative as two of his biggest values. By working on his own schedule to aspiring to create something bigger than himself, entrepreneurship spoke to him because he didn’t want to be siloed into any one label. Srivalsan credits Poppin’s success to being able to think logically and continually about a problem, a skill anyone can develop if they put in the effort.
So what does Poppin offer that UCLA didn’t already have? The reason for creating the party platform, Srivalsan says, is that there are huge barriers a host faces when throwing an event. Flyering and guerilla marketing is time-consuming and ineffective when it comes to throwing larger scale-events, and as an attendee, it’s difficult to keep track of events without scrolling through Instagram for infographics that end up being scattered across feeds. Poppin resolves this problem by centralizing your event schedule into a single app.
Beyond easier organization, one feature that differentiates Poppin is that the guest list for every event is publicly available. In this way, Poppin functions as a pseudo-social media app, offering real time updates on peers’ whereabouts, which as Srivalsan says, is “like Instagram stories without the gatekeeping aspect.” This feature compels users to buy-in to events while making management easier for hosts who aspire to bring large crowds together through art, performance, and music.
Partying aside, building a startup takes a village. More specifically, it takes the support of Westwood Village to keep the startup alive. Though Poppin is a small team of 6–7 people comprised of UCLA’s top software engineers, designers, and entrepreneurs, their product must cater to its ten thousand users, which requires them to be constantly innovating.
Take for example Poppin’s expansion at UCLA. From hiring promoters to sourcing venues, Srivalsan and his co-founders poured all the funding they could gather into promoting the app. They’d throw parties, charge a small fee, reinvest the funding into a second party, and so on until they caught the attention of investors who, after recognizing their product’s market potential, provided the startup with the resources they needed to expand.
Yet despite Poppin’s massive growth this year, the one constant Srivalsan insists on is the people. Srivalsan said, “It’s been important to me to stay loyal to the people who got us here in the first place because we’re building a product for college students. All of our team is composed of college students.” By keeping events local, Poppin can build its brand without sacrificing the trust of the people the app was made for, and that’s a relationship Poppin is not planning to change anytime soon.
For 2023, Srivalsan identifies three buckets that reflect his growth strategy, the first being social outcomes, such as including app features that allow users to connect with one another and find common ground. Secondly, he hopes to incorporate safety concerns into his design process via an anonymous reporting feature that will curb incidents of violence, assault, and property damage. Lastly, Srivalsan expresses a fascination with AI and is excited about how Poppin can make effective use of generative tools down the line.
As they continue to grow, Srivalsan’s one big hope is that Poppin will “be seen as a social connection platform that enables people to build communities within communities, which is so much more than just the parties.”
